Care for a short history lesson?

As of November 1, 2002, we, Mandy and Klaus Boehnke (plus our older son Philip) became inaugural College Masters of Mercator College and held that office until January 31, 2007.

To tell you a few details about our time as CMs, please allow us to very liberally quote from our farewell speech at the formal transmission ceremony to Niky and Vik Unnithan in 2007.

A look at step ‘zero’ first. Our first college experience came about during the very first orientation week of the then International University Bremen in September 2001. We stayed in the officially yet unnamed Krupp College after no space had been made available for us in the guesthouse, in one of the student suites, windows without blinds, beddings unpacked, pouring rain for an entire week, Mandy in one room, Klaus in the other, and our then 9-month-old Philip in the drawer from underneath the bed (pulled out, of course, not in).

Then came the summer of 2002, and we read an announcement on what would today be Jacobs Official: College Masters sought for the newly built second college of the then IUB, the Mercator College, refurbished through a generous donation from the Mercator Foundation. We were a bit ambivalent about applying, but the then College Masters of Alfried Krupp College, Marita Hartnack and Hartmut Wessler insisted that we should. They told us about a job without pay that turned out to be exactly what they told us it would be, challenging and exhausting, a wonderful job so-to-speak. In hindsight, we owe Marita and Hartmut a great thank you for a bit more than four gratifying years.

What did we find in the college after we had finally settled in in late January 2003, after a brief period of commuting from downtown for two nights a week?

Well, we found Samuel Johnson and Przemek Borkowski, but we’ll come back to that later. Otherwise, we found an empty building filled with a few second-years from the pioneer class mixing in with about 120 students from the new second batch. No furniture, no pictures on the wall, no college spirit. A lot of work waiting for us! We did not invest much creativity into our first furniture; because we bought some similar IKEA pieces that already Krupp had bought a year before, the furniture by the way being a student choice.

But from then on we invested into becoming something of its own kind. Country Information Days were ‘invented’, countries presenting themselves to the then IUB community, commencing in early May 2003 with the first-ever CID hosted by Nepal, always preceded by a dinner invitation to our apartment, where we tried to reward the students from the hosting country with home-cooked food from their national cuisine. At these dinners we also started the tradition of the so-called biography rounds: Whenever there was a dinner at the CM apartment (and there were many, the CID count at the end of our tenure was 23), we had a biography round, in which we and the invited students told each other our biographies at a self-chosen length. Speaking of self-chosen length: Pioneer batch student Uroš Urošević spoke about his life for 43 minutes, but others kept it to some 3 minutes.

Which other groups did we invite? Always the floor reps, the Mercator student parliament mandatees, the college office team, so, eating – not out but in – became one of the main pleasures of our college master years.

Obviously we also had to attend to the empty walls in the college. This had to be remedied in our view, so the Mercator Art Contest was inaugurated (including a Vernissage). Although even now not all walls of the college are ‘full’ yet, many of us Mercatorians take pride in calling Mercator the Art College.

Clearly so, we cannot call ourselves the Sports College, because that label is deservedly reserved for the Sarah and Ryan Richards College (to finally give that one a name, the name of its first college masters). Nevertheless we attempted to also offer some sports with a Mercator twist by starting (admittedly fairly late in our term of office, namely in November 2005) the Mercator Badminton Challenge Cup, which we continued at longer intervals as honorary members of this college that we now are.

A college spirit does, however, not only live from the ‘big’ events, but regularly much more so from the small, low-threshold events. These could never have been organized without the dedication shown by Samuel Johnson and his highly committed college office student team. Let us mention the Mercator cheer-ups in the college office (events well hearable in the College Master apartment), Mercator Spirit Days of all kind, among them the campus-famous Italian nights, pajama parties, midnight breakfasts, St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, and last but not least—organized first-and-foremost by the Mercator College floor reps—the MercatorStrasse fest.

Some people may wonder why the heck did we not prolong our contract if all was so wonderful. Well, not all was! Repeatedly acts of vandalism got us into confrontation with larger groups of students. Not only these repeated acts of vandalism and of irresponsible behavior by some students, or the carelessness of some others that made us feel we are the janitors of the college, or student thefts of college property or thefts committed by outsiders, almost non-hidden dealing of soft drugs ten meters away from campus plus the enjoyment of consuming these very drugs in college rooms that were not even smokers rooms. All this sometimes made college mastering tough and prone to produce burnout.

Well, let us stop here. Let us express we are 150% sure that with our successors ‘our’ college is in perfect hands, not the least, because we feel that they—as did we—fully subscribe to our college’s mission statement:

• Make diversity an asset
• Foster personal growth
• Care for emotions
• Experience the community
  

  (written by Mandy and Klaus Boehnke)